Set Visit Preview: The Last Airbender

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IGN travels to the set of M. Night Shyamalan's live-action adaptation.

By Kara Warner

Last week, IGN was invited to visit the Philadelphia-based set of M. Night Shyamalan's latest project, The Last Airbender. The film is based on Nickelodeon's highly popular animated series and is the writer/director's first foray into family-friendly features.

Note to fans of the cartoon series: Know that we went into this particular assignment with slightly more skepticism than usual, but -- without revealing too many details (because we can't) -- if they pull off everything according to what Night, cast and crew presented us, we will be pleasantly surprised.

In brief, the story revolves around Aang, an Avatar -- a once-in-a-century-chosen one embodied with "the spirit of the planet manifested in human form." He possesses the ability to manipulate the four elements and is tasked with keeping the Four Nations at peace. He is also the last surviving member of the Air Tribe. Unfortunately for Aang, the Fire Nation has been waging war against the others for 100 years and in order to defeat them, the young Airbender -- along with his Waterbender friend Katara and her brother Sokka -- must master all four elements (over the course of three films, Paramount hopes) in order to restore balance to their world.

Shyamalan isn't the first director who comes to mind for a PG-rated project, but he assures us he is taking the job seriously.

"It felt like an important movie [to make]," Shyamalan says of tackling the film. "The mythology [of the series] was so well thought out and has Buddism and martial arts and… it has the deeper issues at its core. It's going to be a really fun summer movie, but underneath it [there is] a seriousness that talks about genocide and balance in the world and all the things that interest me that you've seen in other movies I've made."

Night says he was also extra careful with the series' major plot points -- not only out of respect for the series' fans, but because his daughters (who are Avatar-obsessed) would not forgive him for a bad interpretation. And perhaps as such, this film has taken two-and-a-half times the amount of work of his other films.

The elaborate set, for instance, is the largest EVER built on the East Coast, thanks to a construction crew of 250 and a total crew of 650. Shyamalan promises plenty of martial arts action and that his changes to the story have been minor -- upping the political drama a bit and losing the "slap-sticky stuff" from the cartoon.

Cast-wise, Shyamalan chose actors with a "spectrum of colors" in their acting palette. Newcomer and dead-on Aang lookalike Noah Ringer (who, at 12, is already a black belt in Taekwondo) plays the title role; semi-newcomers Nicola Peltz (Deck the Halls) and Jackson Rathbone (a.k.a. Jasper Cullen of Twilight fame) play siblings Katara and Sokka; while Dev Patel -- in his first post-Slumdog Millionaire role -- plays evil-yet-vulnerable, Prince Zuko.

"I wanted to do something as distant to Slumdog as possible," Patel says of signing on to play Zuko. "What's more different than playing a prince of a fairy tale nation who can control fire? I wanted to stretch myself as an actor. This guy in a nutshell, he's a villain with a heart. He's not evil for the sake of being evil."

In addition to the multi-layered villainy, Patel underwent martial arts and fight training for his action sequences. "They whipped my butt into shape," he says with a grin.